Wonder/Wander
A good library will never be too neat, or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them. -Lemony Snicket
I had a nice long talk with my dad today. It seemed appropriate for my birthday to be talking about my future. So far all I have done is school, well and that one month working at the nursing home but we don't talk about that. When I was in high school my parents, mostly my dad, didn't want me to have to work. My dad worked in his father's grocery store as long as he can remember and my mother remembers her high school days working in the hospitial where her mother was a nurse and, for some reason that I only vaguely understand yet, the didn't want that for me. So I went to college and still didn't work.
But now things are a little different, I graduate in December and I keep talking about looking for work but I've really made no motion to do so and then my dad asked if I would be coming home for Christmas. Perfect excuse, so the job path is deverted until the new year.
I think he may have wondered about me though because he asked me what I wanted to do. I know that he knows that I know I don't want to work retail for the rest of my life. I have flirted with many jobs ideals, all of them involving something more than BA. Today my dad asked me about my most recent one, library science, and I was off and running. I told him all about the programs that I've looked into, what they require, why I like UW overall, and where I want to end up with the career.
"Wow, you've really researched this," he said.
And that's when it hit me, I have really researched this. I have never looked at a job and looked at schools and made decisions and visualized how I want to further those goals and what career path I would love forever. So even if finding a job proves difficult in the next few months, I've got a goal and the supportive parents who don't think I'm at all weird for wanting to become a librarian.
For anyone who cares, I want to become an archivist eventually and I would love to work with digital collections specifically. Although I keep visualizing myself as that angry public librarian...
Geeky Noveling
So, NaNoWriMo has not been going at all well for me. I haven't reached my target word count for the past three days. I had a paper due this morning and watching CNN took up all my evening last night. May I just say, in as subdued a manner as I can manage, WHOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! I know this isn't a magic cure all but I'm still particularly excited.
Anyway, my point in posting was that while I have not gotten very far on my novel, I am totally geeking out about LaTeX. Holy eff, how have I never worked with this before? A friend's boyfriend who geeks out over similar things and is a Comp Sci person too was talking about it sometime last year and I just kinda blew it off. Then I saw a lot of talk about it from people who were writing their novels on Linux computers (my laptop runs Ubuntu) and I couldn't find anything comparable to Q10 (which I love, but does not play nice with things besides Windows) that worked on my laptop so I decided to take the plunge and try something completely different. I am in love. I have so far been making each chapter a text file and then setting it into my novel latex file and compiling it to check the overall format and I heart it. I'm using Kile on Ubuntu and the sffms class to layout my file. Also I've been typing the story mainly on Writer, which allows me to add to it from my laptop and my desktop.
Procrastination, Or Justifying Writing A Novel
I have a paper due Wednesday and I'm not done with the spreadsheet for my professor, but I've written some of my NaNoWriMo novel. I haven't gotten as far with it as I want to, but ideas are buzzing around my head and I'm feeling pretty good about this novel, even if I don't make the November deadline.
My story Jack, Or Things I Know About the World is kind of a weird fantasy/alternate universe/finding yourself drama. The main guy's personality is based off my cat... Yeah, I promise I'm not a crazy cat lady yet, it just really worked out. He's slightly quirked but loyal. The main girl is a bit of a ditz, but really she just wants a daddy-figure. And then there's a guy named Richard, who may actually be two or three different guys, but is probably just one and a half.
Anyway, the preface (or Chapter Zero) is up at a blog I've made for the challenge. I'm probably going to post more, but not until I've worked and reworked each section. The preface has been looked over about five times already. There's also a pre-preface but it was written before the challenge and is basically plotness that may/may not actually be given away early on so I think I'm going to keep it to myself until I decided how the story will actually play out.
Oh, where's this blog you say, it's here(Blogspot).